Major challenges of the conventional spread-transform dither modulation (STDM) watermarking approach are two-fold: (i) it exploits a fixed watermarking strength (more particularly, the quantization index step size) to the whole cover image; and (ii) it is fairly vulnerable to the amplitude changes. To tackle the above challenges, an adaptive spread-transform dither modulation (ASTDM) approach is proposed in this paper for conducting robust color image watermarking by incorporating a new perceptual model into the conventional STDM framework. The proposed approach exploits a new perceptual model to adjust the quantization index step sizes according to the local perceptual characteristics of a cover image. Furthermore, in contrast to the conventional Watson's model is vulnerable to the amplitude changes, our proposed new perceptual model makes the luminance masking thresholds be consistent with any amplitude change, while keeping the consistence to the properties of the human visual system. In addition, certain color artifacts could be incurred during the watermark embedding procedure, since some intensity values are perceptibly changed to label the watermark. For that, a color artifact suppression algorithm is proposed by mathematically deriving an upper bound for the intensity values according to the inherent relationship between the saturation and the intensity components. Extensive experiments are conducted using 500 images selected from Corel database to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ASTDM approach.

In this paper, we propose a dynamic bit-rate reduction scheme for transcoding an MPEG-1 bitstream into an MPEG-4 simple profile bitstream with a typical bit-rate of 384 kbps. For dynamic bit-rate reduction, a significant reduction in the bit-rate is achieved by combining the processes of requantization and frame-skipping. Conventional requantization methods for a homogeneous transcoder cannot be used directly for a heterogeneous transcoder due to the mismatch in the quantization parameters between the MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 syntax and the difference in the compression efficiency between MPEG-1 and MPEG-4. Accordingly, to solve these problems, a new requantization method is proposed for an MPEG-1 to MPEG-4 transcoder consisting of R-Q (rate-quantization) modeling with a simple feedback and an adjustment of the quantization parameters to compensate for the different coding efficiency between MPEG-1 and MPEG-4. For bit-rate reduction by frame-skipping, an efficient method is proposed for estimating the relevant motion vectors from the skipped frames. The conventional FDVS (forward dominant vector selection) method is improved to reflect the effect of the macroblock types in the skipped frames. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method combining requantization and frame-skipping can generate a transcoded MPEG-4 bitstream that is much closer to the desired low bit-rate than the conventional method along with a superior objective quality.

In this paper, we propose an efficient requantization method for transcoding of MPEG video. Transcoding is the process of converting a compressed video format to another different compressed video format. We propose an simple and efficient transcoding by requantization in which MPEG coded video at high bit-rate is converted into MPEG bitstream at lower bit-rate. To reduce a image quality degradation, we use HVS (Human Visual System). By using this effect, the part of image in high activity region is coarsely quantized without seriously degrading the image quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide good performance.